ABSTRACT: Electronic commerce has seen an explosive growth in the recent past with the business-to-consumer model being the most popular among Internet users. Here vendors and retailers provide a virtual shop for consumers to purchase items online. This has brought about a great increase in the consumer's convenience to shop. However, the consumer still has to go to every vendor site to find the best bargain for an item. The next step in electronic commerce suggests that the consumer be allowed to go to only one site that gives him the best results from multiple vendors in order of his priorities. The goal of this thesis is to design such a system. Our electronic marketplace allows multiple vendors to be registered on it. A user specifies his requirements, which is then satisfied by searching across the entire marketplace arriving at the best possible fit. If exact matches are not found, the next best options are returned to the user by dynamically improving the intelligence of search algorithms. The use of software agents to implement the market place adds robustness and scalability to the system.